Talk of The Villages Florida - View Single Post - Sept 22, 200,000 Dead from Covid 19 in the US
View Single Post
 
Old 09-23-2020, 06:34 PM
golfing eagles's Avatar
golfing eagles golfing eagles is offline
Sage
Join Date: Mar 2015
Location: The Villages
Posts: 13,682
Thanks: 1,366
Thanked 14,767 Times in 4,894 Posts
Default

Quote:
Originally Posted by Malsua View Post
Excess deaths are tracked.

Here is wwwDOTcdcDOTgov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths

There was quite a hump in the spring, a bit of a hump in July and now it's dropping down to nothing.

Every area has to go through their initial phase and then it's done in that area. It gets all the weak hosts and then it's done. This is not to say there aren't people it missed, but it seems to weed out the weakest and run out of hosts.

People talking about a spiking in cases but there are hundreds of thousands of tests taking place each day and the specificity and sensitivity of the PCR test is not that great.
Even with 1% false positive, that's 2000 false positives per day. If there are 2000 actual positives, that means that 50% of the "cases" aren't real.

Before you attack the number, you need to go look at the specificity and sensitivity of the PCR test yourself. Understand what it means. This is not to say the disease isn't real or that it's not bad. I know two folks who died due to catching it. It's just that if we had the same kind of testing in April as we have today, this recent increase in cases would be bouncing along the baseline rather than a spike.
Agree. And I'm willing to bet that both the false positive and false negative rates are significantly north of 1%, therefore markedly reducing the sensitivity and specificity of these tests